Annual Conference of the German Association for the Study of British Cultures
19–21 November 2026
University of Würzburg
Call for Papers
‘Populism’ is omnipresent. In the Anglophone world, the frequency of the term’s use peaked around the Brexit vote and Trump’s first election (Herkman 2022; Paul et al. 2019), and the Cambridge Dic-tionary selected it as ‘Word of the Year’ for 2017. Almost a decade later, ‘populism’ still serves as a signature term for the climate of the present. In political debates and private conversations, on TV screens and in social media, in institutional debates and on the pages of popular and academic trea-tises, the term is played to capture a complex and volatile articulation of strategies and dispositions that apparently dominates moods and developments not only in the UK and the US, but also in Ger-many, Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, and indeed all across the globe (Moffit 2020; Schiller 2018; Schwenck 2023). Once relegated to the margins, what we call ‘populism’ has moved to the centre not only of society and politics but also of culture and the arts. If populism professes to translate cultural dispositions into a political programmatic, then cultural studies is ideally poised for its critical exami-nation. What is usually deemed to be at the heart of populist discourses is a binary opposition be-tween the elite and ‘the people’, often couched as a rhetoric of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ (McGuigan 1992; Kranert 2020). Populist discourses thus seem to press the necessity that ‘the people’ must come into their own, but it is unclear whether they are meant do so as political agent or political object.
BritCult 2026 addresses the need for systematic attention to the cultural roots, the cultural practices, and the cultural assumptions of populism, and possibly also the cultural acts and agendas necessary to wrestle with populist cultures past and present. Claiming to mobilize an integrated culture of ‘the people’ not only against impoverishment and elitism but also against cultural heterogeneity and dis-persion, populism determinedly politicizes culture and culturalizes politics If you are interested in contributing a 20-minute paper, please send your abstract (c. 300 words) and a short bio-note (c. 150 words) by 15 April 2026 to anglistik-britcult2026@uni-wuerzburg.de.
Venue
Most conference events will be held in the Schelling-Forum Würzburg (Klinikstraße 3, 97070 Würzburg).
The keynote on the first evening will be held at Spitäle (Zeller Str. 1, 97082 Würzburg).
Postgraduate Forum
Information on the Postgraduate Forum 2026 will be made available shortly.
Keynotes
Juha Herkman (University of Helsinki)
Title: TBA
Juha Herkman is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Helsinki. Over the past decades, he has conducted extensive research on political communication and the interplay between populism and media. He also has a solid academic background in British cultural studies, with a particular focus on media culture. In addition to publishing a substantial number of articles in prestigious academic journals such as Cultural Studies, Acta Sociologica, Media, Culture & Society, and Journalism Studies, Herkman is the author of A Cultural Approach to Populism (2022, Routledge). He also co-edited Populism, Twitter, and the European Public Sphere (2024, Palgrave) alongside Emilia Palonen.
Melanie M. Schiller (Radboud University)
Title: TBA
Contact
Organising team
- Zeno Ackermann, English Literature and British Cultural Studies
- Gesine Drews-Sylla, Slavic Studies
- Kirsten Sandrock, English Literature and British Cultural Studies
- MaryAnn Snyder-Körber, American Cultural Studies
email: anglistik-britcult2026@uni-wuerzburg.de
website: English & American Studies, University of Würzburg
Postal address
Lehrstuhl für Englische Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft
Neuphilologisches Institut
Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg
Am Hubland
97074 Würzburg